The Journey Home

by Jorge Posada

  That definitely applied to me before I started to grow. I was used to being made fun of, and the Dumbo references and people flicking my ears got old really fast. At first I tried using humor to get people to lay off. When they called me Dumbo or made some other remark about my ears, I’d say, “Well, if I’m Dumbo, then you should see my trunk.” That got a few laughs, but that didn’t end the teasing. So I decided that I had to be a little feisty and started to take swings at a few of the people whose mouths I couldn’t stand. Even though I didn’t stand very tall, I had to stand up for myself.

  Fighting was always a tricky thing. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hothead, and that made some people want to see how I’d respond. They liked the idea of pouring gas on a flame. None of the fights were very serious, and I’m not sure if they had anything to do with how the school’s faculty viewed me, but I really didn’t care—if I was being harassed, I wasn’t going to take it.

  It’s funny, but the only really big fight I got into resulted from a misunderstanding, not from being teased. When I was in eighth grade, I was walking down the hallway between classes when a senior named Ricardo cornered me and said, “Are you messing with my girl?”

  “I don’t even know who your girl is.”

  “I heard from people you’ve been talking to her. In your history class. You can’t be doing that shit with Jeanine.”

  Jeanine was in one of my classes, but I didn’t like her; I barely knew her or talked to her, and I liked another girl at that time anyway. I knew it was stupid to try to talk to this guy, so when he told me to meet him outside the school grounds later that afternoon, I told him I’d be there. So was my dad. He was scheduled to pick me up to take me to baseball practice.

  Like in a scene out of a coming-of-age movie, people were trailing after me to watch me get my ass kicked. I walked out of school and into the parking lot. My dad sat in the car, reading something. I walked up to him and said, “I can’t come with you right now.”

  “What did you do? They keeping you after class? Jorge, this is—”

  “No,” I said, my voice louder and more forceful than I intended it to be. That took my dad by surprise, and he let me go on. “That guy,” I nodded toward Ricardo, “wants to fight me. If I don’t fight that guy, then I’m going to be a loser. Everyone’s going to think I have no balls.”

  My dad shut off the ignition and opened the door. I thought for sure that he was going to go over there and say something to the other kid; instead, he tugged at my shirt.

  “Take this off. Don’t get it dirty.”

  I took off my school shirt and then adjusted my T-shirt. I started to walk over toward Ricardo, who had a confused look on his face. I turned around and saw that my dad was a few paces behind me. He stopped and then said, “You go on. I just want to be sure this is a fair fight.” He took a few steps back and folded his arms, looking just like I’d seen him so many times on a scouting mission.

  Ricardo charged hard at me, and I stayed low and caught him with my shoulder at his belt. I used my legs and lifted him off the ground and then drove forward. I tumbled on top of him, but he squirmed away. I could sense that I’d literally and mentally knocked him off-balance. He thought he was going to be able to just trample me, but I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  The wrestling match over, we circled one another with our fists up. I thought of all the times my dad and I had done this kind of dance before. Ricardo wasn’t a big guy, but he was taller than me and had a reach advantage. I knew that I’d have to get inside on him, and I bulled my neck and came at him, my arms and hands in front of my face. He threw a couple of big roundhouse punches that had no hope of connecting.

  I hit him once in the stomach and then grazed his cheek with a short jab. I was a bit off-balance, and he hit me in the mouth. It wasn’t a direct hit, but I wore braces (of course), and the coppery taste of my blood ran down my throat. I felt like I was going to gag on it, so I spit, and that got the crowd all stirred up when they saw red. Ricardo came at me, not using his long arms to his advantage, and I snuck in a couple of quick punches to his face and neck. He was panting, and I wasn’t winded at all. I got inside on him again and got him in a headlock. He kept swinging and I kept squeezing, staggering him and dragging him to the ground. I got on top of him and pounded my fists on his back a few times, more for show than to do any real damage. I stood up and he stayed down. I knew not to turn my back on him. I backpedaled away and bumped into my dad.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  I slid into the car and watched as the crowd scattered. I got a few fist pumps and thumbs-ups from some of the underclassmen. My dad handed me my shirt, and I folded it carefully and set it in my lap. As I sat there looking at it, I saw it shaking and realized that my legs were vibrating like crazy. I had to take my hands and put them on my thighs to still them. I was feeling pretty good about myself, but I didn’t dare look at my dad. He reached over and tilted my chin toward him. Frowning, he asked, “You ready?”

  “Let’s go,” I said, consciously echoing his words from earlier. “He had enough.”

  My dad drove off, and we stopped at a gas station just a few blocks from the school. I started to open the door to get out to pump, but my dad said, “You stay.” I watched him walk inside the station. His hands in his pockets, he kind of skipped and jumped onto the sidewalk along the entrance. He clapped his hand on the back of another man who held the door open for him. A few moments later, he came out with a bag of ice and a small plastic cup that he proceeded to fill.

  “Hold this against it,” he said, handing me the cup and gesturing toward my lower lip. “We have to get the swelling down.”

  We drove to baseball practice in silence, but unlike other silent times, I felt no tension in the air. With one hand holding the cup to my face, I hung my other arm out the window. Letting my hand ride the air currents, I angled it left and right and felt it being pushed in the direction I chose, not wildly but under control. I felt like Wilfredo Gómez, the tough bantamweight, only I’d been fighting outside my weight class. But I wouldn’t let pride weigh me down too much. I’d enjoy the victory, but even more, I’d enjoy walking down the hallways at school having people know that I was not someone to mess with.

  My mom wasn’t someone to mess with either. After practice, I tried to slip in the back door unnoticed, but she came into my room and stood there shaking her head, her lip quivering, holding back tears. She grabbed me by the arm and led me to the mirror above my dresser.

  “¿Era necesario pelear?”

  I knew better than to tell her the fight was needed, but I said what I really felt. “Sí. A veces.”

  “¿De veras?” she said and continued squeezing my arm tighter with each word. “No. No. Nunca. Nunca. Nunca.”

  She went on to tell me that fighting wasn’t ever an answer. Talking was the answer, the solution. I had to learn to communicate better at some point, or I was really going to get myself in trouble.

  “You don’t want to be a hothead like your father,” she added. “You need to be humble.”

  She walked out of the room, and I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. I sat down on the bed, feeling a mixture of pride, sorrow, and pain. A few seconds later, my mom returned. She held out a dish towel to me. In it, she’d placed a few ice cubes that I could apply more easily to my mouth.

  “For your hot head,” she added. I looked at her, hoping that she was going to smile to take the sting out of her statement.

  She didn’t.

  The next day I saw Ricardo standing near his locker. I could see that I’d done a bit of damage. Both his eyes were slightly swollen. Our eyes met briefly, and then he turned and dug into his locker like he was searching for something. I’d found what I needed. A few of my buddies and a couple of classmates wanted to hear about the fight and held out their hands to congratulate me, but I told them it was over. I’d made my point. I no longer had to let my mouth or my fists do the talking for m
e, mostly because that was the nature of going to school. When some other bit of gossip got stirred up, I wasn’t a headline anymore. That was fine with me. Mostly I just wanted to be left alone, and I got what I wanted.

  A few months later, my dad had me join him in the garage, where he tossed me my boxing gloves. For the first time in a while, I slipped them on and waited for him to lace them up. Then, instead of getting down on his knees, he stood there. I was confused for a moment and then smiled. I should have known better. My dad delivered a hard blow to my right biceps, making it feel like I’d lost all control of that arm.

  “Keep your guard up,” he said. He nodded and winked at me. I got up on my toes and started moving, knowing that it’s harder to hit a moving target but also more gratifying when you do. I can see now that I’d grown in my father’s eyes in more ways than one. He had to get up off his knees because I’d started to get a bit taller, but more than that, my father respected me in a new way. Even if I’d been on the receiving end of more of the punches than the other guy, I think he would have still looked at me a bit different after the fight. The lesson may not have come directly from him, but I’d stood up to someone and done exactly what he’d have wanted me to do.

  Long after that fight ended, and into high school, I spent my time on the field focusing on the things I could control. In August 1986, shortly after I turned 16, my dad said to me, “I want you to try out for a team I’m putting together.”

  At that point, I was done with my American Legion season, which was one of the organized leagues I played in.

  My game had been improving, and I’d become a decent middle infielder. I liked playing shortstop, and the thousands of ground balls my dad had hit to me, along with my naturally strong arm, helped me play the position well. It was becoming clearer to me and to both my teammates and opponents that I wasn’t out there just because my dad the scout/coach wanted me to be there. That respect felt good, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough to realize my dream of making it all the way to the big leagues. I always wanted to be judged on my own skills, but looking back, given how rough my start in organized ball was, I see that might not have always been the case.

  The day of the tryout I was just one of a couple of dozen players out there on the field in T-shirts and uniform pants taking ground balls, hitting, and being assessed by the coaches. The numbers pinned to our shirts were supposed to make us easy to identify, though to be honest, we all basically knew who was who. Toward the end the coaches waved us over, and we gathered down the left-field line. They told us that we were going to run the 60-yard dash. We’d have three attempts at it, and the coaches were going to record our times.

  Though he was nowhere to be seen, I instantly searched for my father. A couple of years earlier, shortly after I’d started eighth grade, my dad had taken me outside after dinner one evening to institute a new element in my training—wind sprints. Of course, this being my dad, they couldn’t just be plain old sprints on a track. We lived at the top of a fairly shallow incline. He led me away from the house, down to the bottom of the hill, and told me to wait there.

  He then walked back uphill, putting one foot in front of the other to count off the distance. Once he got to where he wanted to be, he turned to me and said, “Sixty yards. Every day after school. Ten times.” He swatted at a mosquito and then added, “Under seven seconds. You’ve got to get under seven seconds.”

  I had no idea how fast that was or even why he chose seven as the magic number. Anticipating some of my other questions, he said, “Michelle will come out with you with the watch. She’ll write them down. All ten. Every day. You need to be under seven seconds.”

  I can’t say that I did as he ordered every day over the course of the next two and a half years, but I did so more than 90 percent of the time. I probably wore out four pairs of shoes going up that slope over and over again. At first I was in the high eight-second range, and it seemed like it would be a piece of cake to cut just shy of two seconds off my time. The thing was, those sprint workouts coincided with my growth spurt, when I was finally putting on a bit more weight and growing a bit taller. Those added pounds made a difference. All the cycling and playing sports in the sand had helped me build up strong legs, but I was losing some quickness and lightness on my feet.

  If I close my eyes, I can still hear the sound of my footsteps reverberating off the houses on either side of the street as I tried to get down to under seven seconds like my dad told me I had to. I tried a bunch of different approaches—longer stride, shorter stride, leaning forward, staying fully upright, and over the years I saw some improvement. When I got down below eight seconds, I thought I was doing pretty good.

  The coaches at the tryout that day didn’t say how much a part of their decision the sprint was going to be, but in my head I kept hearing my dad talking about being under seven seconds. If I wanted to be a ballplayer, I had to be under seven seconds. Well, I wanted to be a ballplayer on that all-star team, and I figured that anything other than a sub-seven-second time was going to doom me.

  Glancing out at the field, I saw my father spooling out a long tape measure to establish the official finish line. He set down two bats with a gap between them and then jogged back toward me.

  “You go last,” he told me.

  “Okay,” I replied, wondering why he wanted me to be the last of the runners.

  I stood there while the other guys all did their three sprints. The coaches didn’t announce anyone’s time, and we all stood there talking about who seemed to be moving fast and who wasn’t. Seeing those guys tear away from the starting line, the foul line, and watching as their cleats dug up little divots, I started to wonder how much of an effect running on grass was going to have on my time. I’d been running on pavement in cross-training shoes that had good grip but were a lot lighter than my baseball spikes. I felt a bit of nervousness swirling around in my stomach. A lot was on the line, and I really wanted to make this team. It was going to travel to the United States for a tournament, and I really wanted to see another part of the country.

  When I stepped up to the line for the first of my three sprints, all I could think about was the 60 yards of somewhat chewed-up turf that stood between me and success. For my first effort, I faced the finish line, hunched over slightly at the waist. When I heard the word “Go,” I dug in hard. I felt my spikes catch and then slip a bit, and I tried to count—one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred—but I lost track and just concentrated on pumping my arms and legs. I felt pretty good about it, but who knew? For the second and third tries, I turned sideways to the finish line and pivoted like a base stealer, hoping to improve my momentum at the start. I didn’t count, didn’t really even focus on my running technique, just trusted that all the training I’d done would be enough. I saw nothing but those two bats and the six feet of grass between them.

  When I was done, I trotted back to the finish line. My dad was gathering up the bats.

  “How did I do?”

  “Seven-three the first one. The other one’s like seven-two. Then the last one was good, like seven-one or something, almost seven-two.”

  I felt like I did when I first started hanging upside-down, like my eyes were going to pop out of their sockets and my head was in a vice. I wanted so much to finish under seven seconds, and while I’d come close, I hadn’t gotten all the way there. The sting of that didn’t last long, though. I thought about where I’d started, running it in more than eight seconds. I’d improved, and that was a good thing. If I lost out on this opportunity because of one- or two-tenths of a second, I’d be disappointed—well, I’d be crushed—but still, I had that improvement to hold on to as a positive sign.

  We gathered again as a group and were told that we’d find out in the next day or two whether we’d made the squad. On the drive home, my dad leaned over and nudged me with his elbow.

  “So, you want to know?”

  “Yes,” I said, staring at him bug-eyed. What did he think? I wanted to wait o
n pins and needles for the next few days?

  “All I can tell you is this. You know how fast you ran the sixty?”

  “You said seven-point-one or -two.”

  He let a sly grin spread across his face before he said, drawing out each word, “Seis. Punto. Siete. ¡Cinco!”

  I let out a huge shout and slapped out a drumbeat on the dashboard. Six. Point. Seven. Five! My dad beeped the car horn a couple of times in celebration, and then we both just sat there.

  I know that it must sound strange coming from a guy who spent 17 years in the big leagues and played for a World Series–winning team, but as I think about that moment, even now the hair rises on my arms and I feel a quick thrill of pleasure in my belly. Of all the things I did in my years in baseball, hearing my dad say that I had run under seven seconds, one-quarter of a second under, remains among my best memories in the game. I was so happy that I forgot all about my dad not telling me the truth when I’d asked him on the field about my times. That didn’t matter. The clock doesn’t lie.

  I sat there in the car, and for the day or so afterward, thinking that I’d done it. I’d become a ballplayer in achieving the goal that my father had set for me two years earlier. In one sense, whether I made that team or not didn’t matter; I’d achieved the goal my father set for me. That meant I was a ballplayer.

  If nothing else, that moment, that achievement, best summarizes my career and how I want people to remember me as a ballplayer. I had a goal and I worked at it, bit by bit, day by day. I didn’t go through any kind of huge transformation, but one-tenth of a second at a time, one half-inch at a time, one pound at a time, I got bigger and I got better. Yet, it wasn’t like I’d gone 4-for-4, hit two home runs, and driven in six, or that I’d gone deep into the hole to field a grounder and then gunned the runner out with a leaping, spinning throw. I measured success differently back then, and that was true for a lot of my career.

  For a lot of my young life, it was like my dad sat me down at a table, dumped a bunch of puzzle pieces out of a paper bag, and said, “Okay, put this together.” He’d take a couple of pieces and assemble them, then say, “I’ll check on you in a bit.” I didn’t have a full picture to guide me.